We had a good potato harvest this year, our first, and we’ve pulled out about 50 lbs of green potatoes. Can we use these as seed next season? Any drawbacks to that?
I frequently use green potatoes as seed the following year, as long as those green potatoes look to be in good condition otherwise - e.g. no obvious disease, no scab. Any drawbacks are the same drawbacks from using your own potatoes as seed, not drawbacks from the green on the potatoes.
We planted about 750 lbs of seed potato, so getting 50 lbs with some green on them didn’t strike me as alarming (that’s just over 6% of seed input). Some of them grew close to the surface and peeked out of the ground a bit, etc. That was negligible in terms of numbers. The greatest culprit was our farm stand: they were in 5-lb bags and exposed to too much sunlight.
What are some of the drawbacks to using your own potatoes as seed? Disease?
Gotcha! Thanks for the precisions!
I think the biggest drawback would be disease. When you buy certified potato seed it has been checked for disease during the growing season as well as after harvest. But that said, as I noted I have long saved my own potato seed and regularly keep those green potatoes that peek out of the ground a bit, as long as the tubers look healthy